Angelica Kauffman

There is no accepted count of her paintings, and the main source of figures contradicts itself. The Angelika Kauffmann Research Project, run since 1990 by Bettina Baumgartel, says on its home page that she left an estimated 1000 oil paintings on canvas or copper, 13 frescoes, some 450 drawings and 39 etchings. The biography page of the same project speaks of an oeuvre of over 800 works in all, which cannot be a like-for-like total beside 1000 oils and 450 drawings, and says she produced 41 autograph etchings between 1762 and 1779. A Swiss television report of March 2024, quoting Baumgartel, gave about 800 paintings, about 400 drawings and 40 etchings.

The same pages disagree on prints after her. The home page says more than 600 were made; the biography says over 1000 engravings based on her originals survive. These are the project's own estimates, not a tally of catalogued objects, and the catalogue itself is still in preparation. Its stated scope is more than two thousand works by and after her, in public and private collections in Europe, Russia and the United States. Until it appears the honest figure is a range, and the reader should treat any single number in a museum label or auction essay as a quotation from one of these estimates.

The best document for her mature career is her own. After she left England in October 1781 she kept a handwritten memorandum, in Italian, of the pictures she painted: the subject, the size, the sitter or buyer, the price and how it was paid. Lady Victoria Manners and Dr G. C. Williamson found it in the library of the Royal Academy and published a translation by Signora Vitelleschi in their 1924 book, which they say was written because of the discovery. It runs from Venice in December 1781 to her death, a span the editors give as twenty-five years.

It is not complete. The editors note that the manuscript itself says certain portraits were left out, and that they know of at least one picture dated 1800 that it does not mention. Where it does record a picture, it can overturn an attribution: the half-length of the Bishop of Derry with a bust of Maecenas, painted in Rome in June 1790, had been catalogued by the family and in a book on Vigee Le Brun as hers, until the description and a letter from the sitter matched Kauffman's entry. The sources consulted give no shelfmark for the manuscript and no edition of it since 1924, so the 1924 translation, with its editors' stated difficulty deciphering her hand, is what every later writer is working from.

The memorandum gives a working price list, in the currency each client paid. A pair of small rounds for a London buyer, Mr Bowles, was fifty guineas in 1782; another pair of ovals sixty. A head and shoulders portrait without hands for a Roman prelate, Monsignor Gaetani, was twenty-four zecchini in September 1783, which she records as the price settled on for portraits of that size. A larger half-length with hands for Count Brown was eighty zecchini. For the Duc de Chartres she took forty louis d'or. The Bishop of Derry's portrait in 1790 was paid through the Roman banker Torlonia as 258 Roman crowns, which she says was the value of 120 zecchini.

The large pictures sit far above that. She records 460 Venetian zecchini for the Death of Leonardo da Vinci, bought by the Grand Duke of Russia. Thomas Coutts paid 300 guineas for the life-size group of his three daughters, settled through the banker Thomas Jenkins in April 1791. The altar picture for the Holy House of Loreto, ordered by command of Pius VI through his Secretary of State, was 250 zecchini, paid on 5 June 1791. The only conversion in the memorandum is her own: 258 Roman crowns for 120 zecchini. This record gives no modern equivalents: the methods differ by an order of magnitude and no single one was found in a source.

The one institutional fee found is recorded elsewhere. A Somerset House account ledger quoted in the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1892, reproduced by Manners and Williamson, lists 100 pounds to Angelica Kauffman for four pictures in the ceiling of the lecture room, against 125 pounds to Benjamin West for five and 30 guineas to Sir Joshua Reynolds for one. The Academy's own records name the room differently from the ledger, a naming muddle the 1924 authors left standing.

She was the daughter and pupil of the painter Johann Joseph Kauffmann, who moved the family between Chur, Morbegno, Como, Milan and the Bregenz Forest. Her mother Cleophea Lutz died in Milan in 1757, after which she decided to make painting her sole career; in the same year, aged fifteen, she painted frescoes of the apostles on the side walls of the church at Schwarzenberg while her father painted the ceiling. Her second Italian journey, from about 1758 or 1759 to 1766, was given over to study in the Este, Sampieri, Medici and Borghese collections and to painting copies for British travellers, which built the English clientele that took her to London.

Her first marriage is the episode every biography retells and the sources disagree about its detail. The Research Project says only that she was tricked into it by an impostor at the start of her London years. Manners and Williamson, relaying the 1810 biography by De Rossi, name the man as Brandt, who arrived in London in 1767 posing as the Swedish Count Frederick de Horn, had in fact been the real count's valet or natural son depending on the version, and extracted a sum of money before a deed of separation of 10 February 1768. Those details come from a single secondary tradition and should be read as such. Her second marriage, to the Venetian painter Antonio Zucchi in July 1781, was made under a contract that guaranteed her free disposal of her own income.

She appears as 'Kauffmann, Miss Anna Angelica Catherine, R.A.' in its early catalogues; her first exhibits in 1769 were four classical subjects, among them the Interview of Hector and Andromache. A trade writer for a London dealer says she exhibited every year from 1769 to 1782 and was barred, as a woman, from the Academy's life drawing. That last point comes from a gallery's blog and is not independently sourced, but the institutional pattern behind it is not in doubt: Johan Zoffany's group portrait of the Academicians of 1771-72 shows her and Mary Moser only as portraits on the wall.

The four oval ceiling pictures she painted in 1778-80 for the Academy's rooms at Somerset House, Invention, Composition, Design and Colour in the Research Project's wording, were moved to Burlington House and now hang in its entrance hall. In 1924 Manners and Williamson corrected the Dictionary of National Biography, which had given her the Council Chamber ceiling there; that ceiling is by Benjamin West. Their book lists her subjects as Genius, Design, Composition and Painting, and the ledger places the pictures in the lecture room. Design shows a woman copying the Belvedere Torso, a cast of which the Academy owned for its students. Two of the four were to be shown in the 2024 exhibition and the other two lent to Tate Britain.

She painted in oil on canvas and on copper, and early in pastel. The Research Project says she did not paint on wood, ivory or porcelain. Conservation work on Diomed and Cressida of 1788, a picture commissioned by John Boydell for his Shakespeare Gallery and now at Petworth, found by infrared reflectography an underdrawing, most probably in charcoal, laid out on a grid, which the National Trust reads as evidence that she scaled up a smaller sketch. The report of the National Trust display calls it the first time it had been seen.

Her method also leaves a pattern across pictures. Baumgartel has found two bust portraits painted as preparatory studies for the family portrait of Princess Catherine Bariatinskaya and the Polish Chancellor Jerome Andrzej Tamoyski, and argues that Kauffman reused such studies and compositions across commissions. The conservator Inken Maria Holubec, who has worked with the project since 1997, has specialised in the grounds, primers and binders of the paintings, and has published on her works on copper and on her materials and painting process. No pigment table or dendrochronological type series for the corpus was found in the sources consulted, and the technique entries below should be read with that gap in mind.

She became famous partly through the engravers. William Wynne Ryland and Francesco Bartolozzi translated her small mythological and sentimental pictures into red and brown stipple prints that sold widely and served, the Research Project says, as design templates for young artists, so that a fashion a la Kauffman spread across Europe. Ryland himself absconded in 1783 on a charge of forgery and was later executed, according to Manners and Williamson, who draw on Mrs Frankau's research into his case.

Her reputation then drifted away from the pictures and onto the style. In 1924 the authors wrote that any ceiling decoration in her manner was attributed to her, that painted furniture in her style was said to be by her own hand, and that her scenes were reproduced at Sevres and Meissen. The Art Newspaper, previewing the 2024 Royal Academy show, put it that after Neoclassicism fell out of fashion, reproductions of her work on furniture and other decorative objects meant it was no longer seen as serious art but as prettified and domestic.

Here two positions exist and they should not be averaged. Manners and Williamson in 1924 accepted a body of decorative work: ceilings at Luton Hoo and 106 Piccadilly, rooms at 20 Portman Square and Queen Anne's Gate, decoration at Syon House and a gaming room at Clytha Park. They admitted that in most instances the decorative work could be told from that of contemporaries only by the general similarity of line and design to her other work, and they regretted that the Victoria and Albert Museum held no authentic painted piece to serve as a guide. The only payment they could find for her decorative work was the Somerset House account.

The Research Project, almost a century later, says that many wall, ceiling and mantle decorations in English historic houses are erroneously attributed to her and that she did not paint on wood, ivory or porcelain. Baumgartel adds in 2024 that virtually every week another 'Kauffmann' appears and that 90 per cent of them are imitations or forgeries, while genuine works long thought lost still surface in private collections. The two positions are not reconciled in any source consulted. Neither is a verdict on a particular house: each decoration needs its own file.

The documented material is modest and mostly Catholic and humanist in the ordinary eighteenth-century way. A priest is said to have steered her away from an operatic career in her youth, a story given by Wikipedia and a dealer's essay; the Research Project says she was deeply religious and gave generously to her father's village. Her will, abstracted in 1924 from a German art journal, asks for 100 masses on the day of her burial and after, at a stated fee each, and leaves her English and French books to the nephew of Zucchi and her German and Italian books to a Kauffmann cousin. That is an inventory of language, not of a library; no list of titles was found.

Her own description of the altar picture for Loreto, in the memorandum, states that the child Virgin waters a lily, 'the which flower is the symbol of purity', and that a ray of sunlight falls on her. It is the clearest sentence she left about what an image meant. In Rome from 1763 she studied classicist theory and, the Research Project says, pursued Winckelmann's maxim of noble simplicity and quiet grandeur; her portrait of him in 1764 opened doors. From the 1780s she painted large Roman-republic subjects with women at their centre, Cornelia and her children as her treasures among them, which the Research Project reads as new heroines for the Enlightenment, and the Academy curator Annette Wickham says she had an interest in finding active stories about women. These are readings by named scholars, not statements from the painter. No lodge membership, correspondence of that kind or hidden programme turned up in the sources consulted, and nothing in the record suggests one.

Her will says that all she possessed had been won by her work. Her London capital of 3350 pounds sterling at 3.5 per cent went to three Kauffmann cousins, 1000 pounds sterling to her cousin Rosa Bonomi, and 17,790 florins (the abstract prints 17,790-37) held in her homeland to cousins around Schwarzenberg and Morbegno. Her cousin Johann Kauffmann received the studio contents: her books, her engravings, her own pictures, the lay figures and costumes, her drawings and her portrait by Reynolds, with the order that the paintings finished or unfinished in her studio be sold and the proceeds shared. The will adds that of her designs and drawings the worst were to be burnt.

The sale of that studio, the fate of the 'worst' drawings and the whereabouts of the Reynolds portrait are not traced in the sources consulted. Her funeral at Sant'Andrea delle Fratte, which Wikipedia says Canova directed on the model of Raphael's and the Research Project calls the grandest since Raphael's, was followed by a procession; her last pictures were carried in the procession, and a bust by her cousin Johann Peter Kaufmann was placed in the Pantheon beside Raphael's. French occupation in 1798 spared her studio but, the Research Project says, damaged her finances through devaluation.

The market is a story of an artist who never fell far. A gallery that sells her work lists her top public sales as Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi at Christie's New York on 14 October 2021 for 1,110,000 dollars including premium, a group of the Countess of Derby at Christie's London on 8 July 2021 for 562,500 pounds, the Spencer children at Sotheby's New York on 30 January 2019 for 915,000 dollars, and two earlier British portraits at 453,000 and 509,600 pounds. An art-price aggregator lists a pair of 1780 portraits of Mary and Joseph May with their children at Sotheby's London on 4 December 2013 for 1,106,500 pounds, which the aggregator says is higher than the 2021 Cornelia as a realised price. Each source gives different slices; hammer prices are not given for these lots, and the Christie's Safra sale of 24 May 2023 is the only recent lot found with both figures.

Set against her own fees, the prices of the early twentieth century look low. The Coutts daughters picture cost 300 guineas in 1791 and was sold at Christie's in 1922 for 273 pounds, according to Manners and Williamson, whose list also records a version of the 'Angelica divided between Painting and Music', signed Rome 1794, at 650 pounds in 1906. The May pair, which the aggregator says fetched 165 and 60 guineas at Christie's in 1886, made 1,106,500 pounds in 2013 on the same listing.

The Royal Academy's Angelica Kauffman exhibition ran from 1 March to 30 June 2024, co-curated by Annette Wickham and Bettina Baumgartel, with about thirty works, after opening at the Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf in January 2020. In July 2026 the National Gallery in London accepted from the Dallas collectors Richard and Luba Barrett a gift of Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes, a large and fully worked preparatory picture of 1787-8 for a painting commissioned by Catherine the Great that is now in St Petersburg. It is the first Kauffman to enter the National Gallery's current collection; the one bequeathed in 1835 passed to what is now Tate Britain and is believed to have been destroyed at Plymouth in 1941. The Research Project is asking the public for four lost pictures known only from prints, and for portraits of Klopstock and others known only from written sources.